


Love and Lies

by faithinthepoor



Series: Once Upon a Time [19]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-24
Updated: 2013-01-24
Packaged: 2017-11-26 17:57:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/652912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faithinthepoor/pseuds/faithinthepoor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set during Tallahassee</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love and Lies

**Author's Note:**

> In my series this follows my [Fairytale Drabbles](http://archiveofourown.org/works/618763), [Mirror Mirror](http://archiveofourown.org/works/618771), [This Provincial Life](http://archiveofourown.org/works/618775), [Viviane or Nimue](http://archiveofourown.org/works/618809), [Dreams and Wishes](http://archiveofourown.org/works/618851), [All the Better To….](http://archiveofourown.org/works/619484), [Magic Keys](http://archiveofourown.org/works/619497), [Curiouser and Curiouser](http://archiveofourown.org/works/619514), [Snow Blind](http://archiveofourown.org/works/620280), [Spinning Straw](http://archiveofourown.org/works/620288), [Wooden Hearts](http://archiveofourown.org/works/621128), [Poisoned](http://archiveofourown.org/works/622526), [True Love and Other Curses](http://archiveofourown.org/works/625038), [Spellbound](http://archiveofourown.org/works/628806), [Over the Rainbow](http://archiveofourown.org/works/630076), [Facades](http://archiveofourown.org/works/632227), [Lost Girls](http://archiveofourown.org/works/636939) and [Monstrosities](http://archiveofourown.org/works/640162)

When she snaps the manacle shut around Hook’s wrist she feels a sense of satisfaction that is out of proportion to the action itself. Cuffing someone isn’t exactly a new experience. In her time as sheriff she became all too familiar with placing people in handcuffs. Maybe this time it’s different because she doesn’t have to deal with the guilt of arresting somebody that she cares about. Or perhaps it’s just that it’s enjoyable to put the smug bastard in his place.

For some reason Hook seems completely convinced that he is irresistible. He acts as though she should swoon in his presence. Swoon is probably the wrong word. It is way too polite a word to associate with Hook. He doesn’t actually expect her to swoon, he expects her to fall on her back and spread her legs. 

She has no idea where this attitude comes from. It’s true that in a world where women are waiting for a prince to come along and rescue them that feminism is probably a dirty world but it’s hard to believe that many of them fall for Hook’s bullshit. Even Aurora, who seems to define herself by this dead prince of hers, must want more from a man than what Hook is offering.

And the fool has the hide to talk to her about love. As if he knows anything about love. He has no interest in love other than convincing women that they feel it for him so that he can get into their pants. She has no problem with him only being interested in sex. Sex is plenty interesting and she has had her fair share of interesting and meaningless sex. What she has a problem with is Hook trying to pretend that any of this is couched in love. 

Asking her if she has ever loved anyone seems a strange tactic. She wonders how often it works for him. It probably only has to work every now and then for Hook to see it as an effective seduction technique but she’s just not sure why it would ever be successful. Was she meant to feel the pain of never having loved, or been loved, and just fall into the arms of the nearest available man? An act that would have been extraordinarily difficult given they were busy climbing a beanstalk at the time. If she had have loved was she meant to feel a sense of loss and again fall into Hook’s arms? Maybe it works for some but for her whether she has loved or not was irrelevant in this context because she was never going to fall for Hook’s alleged charms.

Hook is a liar and while she may not know much about love she knows a lot about lies. For her entire life any offer of love has simply been a lie in disguise. It’s why she finds it so hard to accept that Snow could love her. Snow doesn’t even know her. Snow loves a tiny bundle that she put into a wardrobe wrapped in a blanket. Snow loves a child who she was going to teach to walk. Snow loves what Emma was not what Emma is. That fact is made clear to Emma every time Snow belittles all the things Emma does not understand about this world. It is more than being appalled by Emma’s ignorance, Emma can see it in Snow’s eyes, Snow grieves for the daughter who should have been at home here.

Emma is not at home here. She has never been at home anywhere. Storybrooke is the closest that she has ever come to having a home and it, like everything else, turned out to be a lie. The town didn’t even exist. The people she knew and thought she cared for weren’t even real. 

Even Regina wasn’t real. She more real than most but she wasn’t just the mayor of a small town. She was a magical, evil queen and Emma feels that she didn’t sign up for that. 

Henry was the one real thing in that town. She wants to believe that he loves her, and he probably does, but she is fairly certain that he would love any mother who wasn’t Regina. He doesn’t care if Emma is worthy of love, he only cares that Regina isn’t. She doesn’t want to be the weapon that Henry uses against Regina but she doesn’t know how to fix things. For some reason, likely related to the fact that he is a child, he is unable to see the wonderful mesh of complexities that is Regina. Having a town full of people frothing in anger at his mother is not going to help with the situation.

When she thinks about it, this is why Hook’s question about love offended her so much. Yes it was intrusive and crossed into an area that was none of his business but that was not the real problem. The issue was that he asked the question as if knowing the answer would mean something when in reality her confirmation or denial would have told him nothing meaningful about her. 

That doesn’t mean that she lied to him. She told him that she’d never been in love and for all she knows that might be true. She doesn’t know how anyone knows that they have been in love. At the time she thought she loved Neal. He was exciting, he felt dangerous and he made her heart race and took her breath away. He was the first person who ever made her think about the future. Neal made her think that her life could be more than just existing. He gave her the dream of Tallahassee but, like everything else, that dream was a lie. 

What they had can not have been love. Love doesn’t leave you like that. It doesn’t send you to jail pregnant with a child that you don’t want. At least not the love these people in fairytale land talk about. If it was a love, it was not one worth fighting for and certainly not one worth dying for.

Maybe love is different in this world. Perhaps by the standards of her ‘normal’, magic free life she has known love. She doesn’t know what the divorce rates are in this land but she suspects they are significantly lower than in the world she knows. This world is backwards, metaphors are literal here. Instead of systems and establishments choking the life out of the little people they have actual giants to step on you. Love here isn’t just a feeling or a term to explain a bond between two people; it is an entity that can be bottled. It apparently has a power all of its own. In this land love itself is more respected than any relationship.

It feels wrong to her and she doesn’t want any part of it. She is allegedly the product of true love and this is meant to be a big deal but it doesn’t mean anything to her. True love didn’t keep her warm, or fed, or scare away the bogeymen. True love abandoned her. It left her alone in a world that crushed her spirit and shrank her heart. If anything true love made it hard for her to love.

This saviour magic of hers is meant to come from true love and maybe it does but it wasn’t fairytale love that broke the curse. The love that broke the curse was human and flawed. If she had to pick a word to describe the love between Henry and herself the best she can come up with is ‘selfish’. Henry can be forgiven, he is just a boy, but she should know better. She cares for Henry but she also knows that a big part of her relationship with him is about trying to correct the mistakes of her past. If she can make him love her now she doesn’t have to feel bad about the fact that she abandoned him, just as she was abandoned. 

This can not be the love that these people prize. If she loves Henry, and she thinks she does, she doesn’t love him enough to die for him. She may have asked Mulan to chop the beanstalk down but that is not same as being prepared to lay down her life. She is not the one who would give her life for Henry - she is not Regina. Regina would die for Henry and no one gives her any credit for that. Regina loves that child even though he doesn’t love her back and yet no one even mentions the power or purity of that love. That doesn’t make any sense to Emma. Love shouldn’t only be good or true if someone loves you back. Love should just be. 

Everything related to Regina seems to come with an attached double standard. She feels that somewhere in fairytale world there is a clause that says that the rules that apply to everyone else don’t apply to Regina. No matter what Regina does it will always be wrong.

She can’t think about love and not think about Regina. There are a lot of lies when it comes to Regina but at least she didn’t lie to Hook about her. She didn’t have to. He asked her is she had ever been in love. He didn’t asked her if she _was_ in love. She honestly doesn’t know what she would have said if he did because she can tell herself many things but trying to tell herself that she doesn’t love Regina, that would be the biggest lie of all.


End file.
